Billie Eilish’s Teenage Truths
How the unfiltered 17-year-old Pop’s new singer queen with of heartbreak dark and visions lust stares became down her anxiety, pop’s onstage new and conscience in the studio
How an unfiltered 17-yearold singer became pop’s new conscience.
Two days ago, Billie Eilish celebrated her 17th birthday at a roller rink here in L.A., and yesterday she got right back to work, which meant hunkering down at “a random-ass hotel” to shoot a video for her new single, “Bury a Friend.” “It smelled like pee and horses,” she says of the hotel, “but we fucking nailed it, dude.” Wearing recently blue hair that she’s now dyeing gray, Eilish sits in the backyard of the bungalow she’s called home since birth. She wrote the new song, she says, “from the perspective of the monster under your bed. Anything could be the monster — it could be someone you love so much that it’s taking over your life. I think love and terror and hatred are all the same thing.”
This is the sort of observation that Eilish rattles off casually in the course of conversation: Her sweet, sleepy singing voice and taste for setting catchy melodies over acoustic and electronic beats belies a brain full of dark visions. To that end, she has made a string of creepy videos, notching hundreds of millions of views, in which black tears pour from her eyes and spiders crawl into her mouth. For “Bury a Friend,” she says, “I had this idea where I’m naked. Like an abduction, and people putting syringes up my arms and in my neck. That’s one of people’s biggest fears — needles — and that’s what I’ve been doing: homing in on people’s fears.” It was a long shoot, physically demanding to the point of injury. “There were a lot of people’s hands, gripping and choking me and pulling my hair,” she says. “And I loved it. I enjoy being fucked with and hurt and tossed around, almost. It feels good for some reason.”
Eilish’s dad brings us water; the family dog, a pit mix named Pepper, takes a dump in the grass a few feet away. She points and laughs — “Bro, that sucks for dogs” — then gives her masochism a shrugging diagnosis. “It’s some weird shit,” she says.
Eilish is as offhandedly funny as she is reflexively dark. Her devotion to “weird shit” manifests not as some goth-y affectation but as an eminently reasonable reaction to a moment when, as she puts it, “shit is messed up.” With several hit singles to her name, Eilish is now finishing her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? She says it’s a reaction to our dystopian present: “There’s a line about hills burning in California.
The skies are all gray and orange. There’s school shootings all the time. It’s like, ‘Things are so fucked, I’m just gonna make art about it.’ ”
Eilish shows me the bedroom of her older brother, musician Finneas O’Connell, where they have collaborated on all of her music. From there she turns into her own bedroom, crammed with clothes that designers have sent her in the hopes she’ll wear them on Instagram for her 11.6 million followers. She hops onto her bed and pulls aside a curtain, revealing a swarm of lyrics and thoughts she’s written on the wall:
“I’m a void”; “I’m gonna drink acid”; “Eat shit.” “My room is all clothes and shoes, but you lift this up and it’s a shithole,” she says. “People who send me stuff don’t realize I grew up poor, and I don’t have a house that can fit things for rich people.”
Her parents are both actors, appearing on crime dramas and doing voice-overs. “It wasn’t, like, ‘My movie-star parents,’ ” says Eilish. “I wish they were famous and that’s why I became famous. But that’s not how it is.”
According to Eilish, her album will continue in the vein of her music so far.
“Half the songs are fictional, half are things I was going through, and no one will ever know which is which.” That blurriness, she adds, has no bearing on how her songs resonate. “Kids use my songs as a hug. Songs about being suicidal or against-yourself — some adults think that’s bad, but I think seeing that someone else feels as horrible as you is a comfort. It’s a good feeling.”
JONAH WEINER